Your Family Photoshoot: The Complete Preparation Guide

A family photoshoot is an investment in documentation — an hour or two that produces images that will hang on walls, live in albums, and exist in twenty years when your children are grown and everyone looks different. I have photographed enough families now to know that the sessions which produce the best images are rarely the ones with the most elaborate planning. They are the ones where a few genuinely important decisions were made well in advance, and everything else was left loose enough for real life to happen in front of the camera. This guide covers those decisions: location, light, outfits, preparing children, and timing, in the order I think about them myself when a new family books a session.

Choosing the Location

The most important location decision is choosing somewhere that suits your family genuinely, rather than somewhere that looks impressive online. A local woodland where your children run ahead and hide behind trees will produce more authentic images than a formal garden where they are required to stay on the path and mind the flower beds. I always ask new families the same question before we talk about anywhere specific: where do you actually spend time together? A favourite park, a beach you visit every summer, a woodland where you walk the dog most weekends — familiar locations produce relaxed portraits because the children already know how to be there, and that ease shows up in every frame.

There is a temptation to chase the most photogenic-looking spot rather than the most comfortable one, and I would gently push back on that instinct every time. A slightly less dramatic setting where your toddler is happy to explore beats a beautiful location where everyone is standing stiffly because the ground is uneven, the grass is wet, or the space feels unfamiliar and formal. If you genuinely have no strong preference, I am always glad to suggest somewhere based on your family's age range, the season, and what kind of images you are hoping for — documentary and candid, or more composed and portrait-led.

Light determines almost everything about how a location will actually perform on the day, and it is worth thinking about alongside the aesthetics. Woodland and tree cover produce beautiful dappled to diffused light through mid-morning and late afternoon, which makes them forgiving locations across a wide window of the day. Open fields and beaches need low sun to be flattering — golden hour, the hour or so before sunset, is not a cliché repeated by photographers for no reason. It is genuinely the best light for the simplest possible reason: it is warm, directional, and flattering to every skin tone in a way that midday sun, coming straight down and creating harsh shadows under eyes and noses, simply is not.

Outfits That Work Together

Choose a palette of two or three coordinating colours and dress within it — not matching identically, which tends to look staged and dates quickly in photographs, but related, so that the family reads as a cohesive group without looking like a uniform. Avoid logos, text, and very busy patterns, all of which draw the eye away from faces and tend to feel dated within a few years in a way that simpler clothing does not. Neutral tones such as navy, white, grey, cream, sage, and dusty rose in classic cuts photograph beautifully and will not look tied to a particular trend when you look back at the images a decade from now.

Layers and textures add a surprising amount of visual depth to a photograph without requiring any extra thought about colour matching. A denim jacket over a plain top, a chunky knit jumper, a cotton dress with some movement in the fabric — these all photograph with more richness than a single flat block of colour, especially outdoors where natural light picks out texture in a way studio lighting flattens out. I would always rather see a family in comfortable, well-loved clothes with some texture and layering than in something new and stiff that nobody can move properly in.

Preparing Children

Tell children as little as possible in advance. Extensive preparation — "we're having family photos today, you have to be good, you have to smile properly" — tends to build anxiety and expectation on both sides, and children who arrive already braced for a formal ordeal are much harder to photograph naturally than children who simply arrive to spend time outdoors with their family. On the day itself, bring snacks, allow genuine movement and play, and let the photographer lead the session with games and small activities rather than posed direction and repeated instructions to stand still and smile.

Children photographed while genuinely playing — running, jumping, helping a parent with some small task, whispering secrets to a sibling — produce images of authentic joy that posed standing portraits simply cannot match, no matter how carefully composed. I would rather chase a child around a field for five extra minutes to get one real laugh than spend those five minutes trying to coax a performed smile out of someone who has already decided they are bored. In practice this means I am often working at the edges of what the children are already doing rather than asking them to do something new for the camera.

For very young children, having a parent nearby but slightly out of frame, ready to make a silly noise or throw something in the air, tends to produce far better results than any direction I could give the child directly. Older children and teenagers generally respond better to being given something to do with their hands or attention — walking somewhere together, looking at something specific, having a private joke with a sibling — than to being asked to pose, which almost always produces the stiff, forced expression that everyone is trying to avoid.

What to Expect During the Session

A family session with me does not look much like the stiff, line-up-and-smile photography many people picture when they hear the phrase. I spend the first few minutes simply letting everyone settle — walking, talking, getting used to having a camera nearby — before any real photography starts in earnest. This settling-in period matters more than people expect. Families who arrive and are immediately asked to pose tend to look tense in the first set of images, whereas families given five minutes to acclimatise relax visibly and the difference shows in every subsequent frame.

Throughout the session I move between looser, documentary-style sequences where I am simply following what your family is already doing, and slightly more directed moments where I ask for a particular grouping or a specific interaction — a parent swinging a child, siblings walking hand in hand, a couple sharing a private joke while the children run ahead. Both kinds of image matter. The candid ones tend to feel the most alive when you look back at them, but the more composed portraits are often what end up printed and framed, so a good session includes a genuine mix of both rather than leaning entirely on one approach.

A typical family session runs for around an hour, occasionally a little longer if young children need more breaks, and I try to build in natural pauses — a snack stop, a chance to explore something that has caught a child's attention — rather than working continuously from start to finish. Sessions that allow for this kind of breathing room consistently produce better images than ones run at a strict, uninterrupted pace, because tired, rushed children rarely photograph well no matter how good the light or location happens to be.

The Best Time of Day

Mid-morning, roughly nine to eleven in summer, works well for woodland sessions because the dappled light under tree cover is forgiving across that whole window and children tend to have the most patience and energy for a session before lunch and any afternoon tiredness sets in. Golden hour, the final sixty to ninety minutes before sunset, is the strongest choice for fields, beaches, and other open locations without much shade, where the difference between flat midday light and warm low sun is at its most dramatic.

Avoid midday and early afternoon wherever you have flexibility. The light is harsh and unflattering at that point in the day, children are often at their most tired or hungry, and the shadows it creates under eyes and chins are difficult to soften even in editing. If a specific time genuinely cannot be avoided because of nap schedules or other commitments, choosing a heavily shaded woodland location minimises the problem considerably, since the tree canopy diffuses that harsh overhead light into something much gentler.

My general advice to families booking a session is to build the timing around the light and your children's natural rhythm first, and treat everything else as flexible around that fixed point. A session booked at the right time of day, even in a fairly ordinary location, will consistently outperform a session at the wrong time of day in a spectacular one.

A family photoshoot done well is less about elaborate staging and more about choosing the right conditions and then getting out of the way so your family can simply be themselves for an hour. If you would like to talk through locations, timing, or what to expect from a session with your own family's ages and personalities in mind, get in touch and we can plan something that genuinely suits you.